Lethal Redemption (13 page)

It seemed like forever. Then she heard the muffled shots. Silence. More firing. Then silence again.

She waited. It flitted through her mind that Porter might be dead. Then what?

And where was Narith?

The idea that she stood defenseless in a reptilian-filled swamp in a communist country being hunted by killers was an absurd reality that she couldn’t process. It had all happened so fast. One minute she’s boarding a flight out of Chicago all excited about going on the search for her grandfather’s plane and the next she’s the most hunted woman in Southeast Asia.

The situation topped anything she’d been through in the Middle East. My life isn’t normal, she thought grimly.

She waited. And when the answer came it was Porter, then Narith, and she found herself able to breathe normally.

Porter emerged like a phantom.

Her opinion of him, already climbing, made some dramatic moves up the scale. It was nice enough that he saved dolphins and liked crocs, but that he could kill when necessary, and in a place like this—the man was in a category she couldn’t help but appreciate at the moment.

Whoever he was, whatever he and guys like Narith were involved in, she was very happy to have him as her guide. He wasn’t just some soldier, he was a goddamn warrior.

“Kiera, Narith, let’s move,” Porter whispered.

They followed him through the water and muck.

When they’d gone about twenty yards or so she saw one of the flashlights still burning under water, and in its dull glow floated a body.

Above them beyond the canopy the chopper, like some angry bird of prey, circled looking for a kill.

They trudged for what seemed like an hour before they no longer heard the chopper. The world around them grew quiet.

Finally, mercifully, they emerged filthy and stinking from the swamp and headed across a grassy field and into some bamboo.

Better air. More light from a partial moon behind a thin gauze of cloud.

Porter stopped for a moment and looked across the jungle toward the dark, odd shaped mountain peaks in the distance.

She felt a stab of excitement about getting up there and finding that plane, telling herself it would all be worth it.

“They’ll hire every mercenary they can find,” Porter said. “We need to get up there and out of the lowlands as fast as we can.” He turned to Kiera. “You ready for a serious endurance challenge.”

“I think I can keep up.”

Porter smiled at her and she felt his respect for her. Her ability to deal with seemingly any level of threat and misery clearly impressed him.

That’s right, this chick’s got the right DNA.

24

After the futile hunt and disappearance of two of his men somewhere in the swamp, Luc Besson’s chopper settled down to a small, desolate compound consisting of four cement buildings in a town that was now little more than a dilapidated outpost.

Cole ducked under the swirling blades of the chopper. They were greeted by the Loa district commander.

The main building, yellow in the moonlight, sported freshly painted balustrades, plus several military vehicles, a car and a lone chopper. It looked like a thousand such outposts in Indochina that Cole had visited over the years. There they could buy fuel and prepare for the mountains.

“Comment allez vous, general,” Besson said.

The general was full of vapid enthusiasm. He had a dense look to him and Cole figured he was ruthless but not overly bright. The perfect pit bull to handle Vientiane’s dirty work in this pitiful outback wasteland.

“The general wants to know if we have any idea where the people we’re after are right now?”

“If we knew, we’d have them. They’re headed into the mountains somewhere,” Cole said with disgust. That nasty little reality changed everything. They had no choice but to involve elements Cole wasn’t happy working with. Such as this guy. The Laotians couldn’t be trusted on any level. Besson may have his arrangements with a powerful apparatchik in Vientiane who, for a price, would let them do what they needed to do, but that price was growing. And it now included finding the exact location of the rebel Hmong, something those fools couldn’t do on their own in their own country.

They didn’t get the Hunter woman in the next twenty-four hours, Cole thought, this was going to become a full-scale nightmare. It could easily become a real nasty situation. Maybe even an international incident.

They were now the guests of a Laotian Communist commander’s hospitality. An irony that grew more interesting when the general started to wax on about how Laos was opening up to the West and would be building resort hotels very soon, like the ones Cole and Besson were invested in, and he intended to get in on the coming economic explosion.

It turned out he was thinking of a future potential partnership with Besson and Cole. A man ahead of his time and maybe a little shrewder than Cole had first given him credit for.

Apparently, Cole mused, in the soul of every communist lurked a greedy little capitalist trying to get out.

“Let him know how happy we’ll be to work with him later. Right now we’re going to need everything your friends can come up with.”

If this guy wanted to be a future partner, now was the time to start.

Negotiations in the pathetic outpost went on over tea, and the general either couldn’t speak English or, if he could, refused.

At one point the general went outside to take a call.

“How fast can you get the money for this bastard?” Cole asked.

“Not till morning.”

The general returned. He assured them that the fugitives would not escape his net. He had some good American Johnny Walker to share. He was very proud that he’d gotten a supply. He also had young girls from the village he offered for their satisfaction. Cole turned him down. “I have only one girl I want to get my hands on. But the Johnny Walker I can do.”

Cole needed a drink. He wasn’t feeling optimistic about any of this now. “Those triple canopy jungles swallowed up armies. They’re impenetrable. How the hell are we going to track them down if we wait around until they are up there?”

Besson spoke with their new associate and future partner for a minute, then turned to Cole. “The general assures that for the right price as bounty, every drug lord, bandit and elephant tusk poacher in Southeast Laos will stay on the hunt. They are already moving into the general area. These are people who really know the mountains and nobody can hide from them very long.”

The general, very happy with himself and a little drunk, left them for the night.

Besson poured another drink. “You know how things are in this country. We have no choice. They want something, we want something. To get what we want we have to give them what they want. Quid pro quo, my friend.”

Cole shook his head and picked up his drink. He mused darkly on his circumstance, thinking: I’m dealing with a fucking communist, an unreconstructed colonialist and chasing the granddaughter of one of the best operatives the world has ever seen on the worst possible piece of land on earth, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And I’m now dependent on poachers and drug runners.

Cole poured himself a strong double.

25

Kiera, thankful for all her conditioning, got a second wind as they trudged relentlessly hour after hour through the night, eventually rising in elevation now.

The walking became a little easier for a short time on the gradual incline, but grew steadily more difficult as they climbed into the low foothills and slogged across quick streams and pushed through thickets of bamboo without the help of machetes or flashlights.

Several times they stopped to get their bearings and look at her GPS and rest.

Finally, in the graying mist near dawn, they emerged at the base of a steep mountain rising hundreds of feet, waterfalls coming down in long vertical drops.

There they came on the remains of a long ago abandoned temple.

In the ruins of the roofless building were pools of water that shone in the predawn like broken glass. And behind the building a larger pool and two fast, narrow waterfalls in a beautiful little alcove of rock walls.

Porter had water purification pills in his pack and an empty plastic water bag. He filled it from one of the thin waterfalls coming off the hill.

While Porter and Narith sat on a broken piece of wall talking, Kiera went off and stripped down to bra and panties and went into the water to wash and check for foreign creatures that might have attached themselves in the swamp.

She’d spent two weeks going up the Amazon and her greatest fear then wasn’t piranha, snakes or jaguars. It was those tiny worms that burrow into the skin, into the veins, circulate around the body to the intestines and lay thousands of eggs a day.

When she was convinced there were no bugs, worms or leeches, she washed and wrung out her clothes and put them on again before joining the men. As she approached she saw Narith slipping off into the jungle.

“Where’s Narith going?”

“He took off for a village to find us a guide.”

“He knows people there?”

“No. But going up into the mountains without a local isn’t going to be a good idea.”

“What if he doesn’t come back? How long do we wait?”

“Couple hours. If he’s not back we’ll have to assume he ran into a patrol and is being detained.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll deal with that when it happens. We’re committed now. One way or another we don’t have a choice. We need to get up there and find the Hmong, then the crash site and see if there is in fact anything there.”

She watched Porter swat at mosquitoes. “Aggressive bastards.”

“You have any Deet in your pack?” she asked.

“Deet’s crack to these mosquitoes,” Porter said as he searched among some dead tree stumps. “Squashed termites work really good. But finding a nest—”

“I’m not rubbing termite mash all over my now clean body. I’ll take my chances.”

Kiera took a good look at the ruins as some light emerged in the predawn sky, seeping down through the rising mists. She thought it must have once been majestic. Some of the still standing granite around the pool had chiseled in them multi-faced Buddha looking with philosophical solemnity in several directions.

Many Hindu figurines in bas-relief adorned the walls.

“Did the Hindus precede the Buddhists? I can’t remember which religion is the oldest.”

Porter put his Glock down on a rock next to her. “The Hindus were first in this area. A long time ago they built lots of these temples. Later the Buddhists took over and converted them, but left behind a lot of Hindu stone work. Back hundreds of years the kingdoms in this part of the world used female defense forces as personal body guards for the royal courts. They didn’t trust males. So they trained up females. There’s speculation that much of the world around Southeast Asia was run as a matriarchy well after your Trung sisters.”

He got up. “My turn to clean up.”

“I’ve seen her before,” Kiera said, pointing to a bas-relief on the broken wall. It was of a woman in some kind of dance.

“Vajrayana Buddhism. Popular in Tibet and the Himalayas,” Porter said. “She represents a special energy,
shakti
, visualized as a female sky dancer.”

She looked at it, then added, “Energy as in Henri Bergson’s
élan vital
? “

“Maybe a little more unruly. She’s got a volatile temperament, not unlike some of the women I run into from time to time.” He smiled at Kiera. “She’s usually depicted naked revealing her involvement with sexual desires and passions, among other things. But she’s really not about sex so much as expressing
rigpa.
A stripping away of obscurity. It’s the path into Dakini paradise, enlightened bliss. Ridding ourselves of our cultural baggage and getting to the essence. Which, if followed properly, leads to a kind of trust in the nature of things. I like to think that a little sex thrown in is a nice reward for being right with nature.”

“So does that mean if I dance naked and give off plenty of
rigpa
, it’ll help me on the road to Nirvana?”

He chuckled. “I don’t know about you, but it’d do wonders for your audience.”

Porter went over to the pool and stripped. She meant to give him some privacy, but he did it so fast she didn’t have much opportunity to look away. She smiled to herself. Man had assets.

When he stepped naked into the water, she shocked herself by asking him if he needed someone to wash his back. It was pathetic, almost laughable. And she knew he’d take it as a joke, as she hoped that she intended.

Instead he said, “Absolutely.”

She blamed the whole event that followed on the fatigue and the extreme stress of what they’d gone through. There was no talking. No exchange of pleasantries and admirations. Just physical intensity.

At first there was some getting adjusted to each other and that went smoothly. Some lovers in her past were either awkward, unsure, or aggressively hungry and fast. He was methodical, experienced and took his cues from her for a time, then just took over with great proficiency, picking her up and she wrapped her legs around his hips. She buried her face in his neck and let what happened happen.

And when it ended, when the tensions fled her in a series of shuddering releases, he had to carry her out of the pool to the bank and hold her until she got her legs back under her and blood flow back to her limbs.

He didn’t say anything, just stared off into the surrounding jungle as though he was listening to make sure no foreign sounds were there. Then he returned to the pool and swam a little, washed his clothes and she joined him in the water again. Not really to have a second go, she didn’t need that, but it happened anyway.

She remembered saying something about was he trying to kill her and he suggested maybe it was the other way around.

After that they got out. She dried herself the best she could.

He wrung out his clothes and helped her do the same. Then he cleaned his socks and trekking sneakers and put them on. Finally both were dressed.

Porter picked up his Glock. “I’ll be right back.”

“You’re going where?”